Desktop printers for use in home and office environments are well known and are widely commercially available with varying designs and capabilities. Typically, commercially available desktop printers are of a size and configuration that requires a relatively substantial amount of space to accommodate the printer unit and associated components, such as print media input and/or output trays. Indeed, much of this large “footprint” of conventional printers may be occupied by the input and output trays. The footprint of the printer typically also includes the space required for accessing the printer and for printing in an unobstructed manner.
Even in conventional printers which do not use such print media trays and incorporate print media source and collection areas within the printer unit itself, a limitation in minimising the printer's footprint still remains in that it must at the very least correspond to the largest print media size to be printed, for example, A4 or A3 paper.
With the ongoing trend of smaller and more compact workstations it is necessary to maximise the available workspace, such that it is becoming increasingly necessary to reduce the amount of space occupied by equipment, such as desktop printers. Thus, there is a need to minimise the footprint of a desktop printer.